About the Event

The National Endowment for Democracy and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty invite you to join us for a special event with 2015 Nobel Laureate for Literature Svetlana Alexievich in conversation with Leon Wieseltier, Contributing Editor, The Atlantic; Berlin Senior Fellow in Culture and Policy, Brookings Institution.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2015 was awarded to Belarusian Svetlana Alexievich “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.”

Alexievich depicts life during and after the Soviet Union through the experience of individuals. In her books she uses interviews to create a collage of a wide range of voices. With her “documentary novels”, Alexievich, who is a journalist, moves in the boundary between reporting and fiction. Her books criticize political regimes in both the Soviet Union and later Belarus and her central message is that post-communist countries like Belarus will not become free and democratic if the people of these societies cannot free themselves from the destructive Soviet legacy that affects even young people who never lived under communism.

Her latest novel, “Second-Hand Time,” was recently translated into English and will be available for purchase at the event. 

Alexievich has been profiled in the New Yorker Magazine and the The New York Times.

Speaker Bios

Leon Wieseltier is the Isaiah Berlin Senior Fellow in Culture and Policy at the Brookings Institution and a contributing editor and critic at The Atlantic. From 1983 to 2014, he was literary editor of The New Republic. Wieseltier is the author of several books of fiction and nonfiction, including Kaddish, a 2000 National Book Award finalist. He has written many widely published essays on a broad variety of subjects, including technology and culture, foreign policy and the spread of democracy, the refugee crisis, the ethics of interventionism, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Middle East, and religion and politics. In 2013, Wieseltier was awarded the Dan David Prize.

Press must RSVP with NED Public Affairs. If you are a member of the press, please RSVP with your credentials to press@ned.org.